NJ.com High School Sports section gets a redesign

In the past week or so, you may have noticed the first phase of our complete redesign of our High School Sports section on NJ.com. Now that the fall season has officially begun, we’re very excited to share these changes with you.

It’s a design that reflects the features you tell us are important, and it incorporates the cleaner, bolder, simpler look you see on the rest of NJ.com. This first step upgrades the home, sport, school, team and article pages. The next step -- coming pretty soon -- upgrades the scores, schedules, standings, stats, brackets and player pages.

There are big changes, including the chance for you to personalize the display of the site. We want to provide the best and latest content and user experience delivered to the devices you love.

Here's a look at the key changes:

Navigation menu

The menu bar shows all the in-season sports. (Screenshot)

The menu button on the left of our top navigation bar opens to reveal all of the in-season sports. It’s also the place to find the other important areas of NJ.com, such as the News and Sports sections.

There is a permanent strip of links on the top of all the pages to help you instantly find Standings, Scores and Schedules, and School/Team/Player pages.

Favorite schools and teams

Click on the star next to a school or team name to add as a favorite. (Screenshot)

You now have the ability to select favorite pages in the high school sports section, which will customize your display and make it easier for you to follow the schools and teams you care about most.

If you are registered with NJ.com, you can select a school or team as a favorite by clicking the star button next to the school or team’s name.

Those favorite schools and/or teams will then be permanently available when you click on your avatar/user name at the top of the page when you are logged in (see images, left).

If you aren’t already registered with NJ.com, what are you waiting for? You can sign up now for free to start tracking your favorite teams.

Other new features

The new look on mobile has bigger images and easier navigation. (Screenshot)

• The article page is redesigned to include bigger images, more photos and more videos. Each page also includes prominent links to other stories around the site via the "Featured News" box.

• Your mobile experience using smartphones and tablets should be much improved, as we now have bigger images and an easier navigation.

• We also now have a comments section in every high school sports story. So now you can have the discussion and debate about our Top 20 rankings, game stories or anything else right at the bottom of that article. Just remember to please follow our Community Rules before posting.

• We have streamlined how we're posting stories, resulting in simpler navigation to wherever you want to go next -- particularly on mobile devices -- and resulting in more stories than ever before being routed to school and team pages.

We hope you enjoy the new site. Feel free to post a comment and tell us what you think of the new design, or suggest more improvements, as well as to engage in conversation about all aspects of high school sports.